Recent Articles

Sep 2020

Taking Your Chances

by in CodeSOD on

A few months ago, Sean had some tasks around building a front-end for some dashboards. Someone on the team picked a UI library for managing their widgets. It had lovely features like handling flexible grid layouts, collapsing/expanding components, making components full screen and even drag-and-drop widget rearrangement.

It was great, until one day it wasn't. As more and more people started using the front end, they kept getting more and more reports about broken dashboards, misrendering, duplicated widgets, and all sorts of other difficult to explain bugs. These were bugs which Sean and the other developers had a hard time replicating, and even on the rare occassions that they did replicate it, they couldn't do it twice in a row.

12 comments - Last comment @ 10:54

The Watchdog Hydra

by in Feature Articles on

Ammar A uses Node to consume an HTTP API. The API uses cookies to track session information, and ensures those cookies expire, so clients need to periodically re-authenticate. How frequently?

That's an excellent question, and one that neither Ammar nor the docs for this API can answer. The documentation provides all the clarity and consistency of a religious document, which is to say you need to take it on faith that these seemingly random expirations happen for a good reason.

27 comments - Last comment @ 08:49

Where to go, Next?

by in Error'd on

"In this screenshot, 'Lyckades' means 'Succeeded' and the buttons say 'Try again' and 'Cancel'. There is no 'Next' button," wrote Martin W.

18 comments - Last comment @ 00:38

A Generic Comment

by in CodeSOD on

To my mind, code comments are important to explain why the code what it does, not so much what it does. Ideally, the what is clear enough from the code that you don’t have to. Today, we have no code, but we have some comments.

Chris recently was reviewing some C# code from 2016, and found a little conversation in the comments, which may or may not explain whats or whys. Line numbers included for, ahem context.

23 comments - Last comment @ 2020-09-25

A Random While

by in CodeSOD on

A bit ago, Aurelia shared with us a backwards for loop. Code which wasn’t wrong, but was just… weird. Well, now we’ve got some code which is just plain wrong, in a number of ways.

The goal of the following Java code is to generate some number of random numbers between 1 and 9, and pass them off to a space-separated file.

23 comments - Last comment @ 10:19

A Cutt Above

by in CodeSOD on

We just discussed ViewState last week, and that may have inspired Russell F to share with us this little snippet.

    private ConcurrentQueue<AppointmentCuttOff> lstAppointmentCuttOff
    {
        get
        {
            object o = ViewState["lstAppointmentCuttOff"];
            if (o == null)
                return null;
            else
                return (ConcurrentQueue<AppointmentCuttOff>)o;
        }
        set
        {
            ViewState["lstAppointmentCuttOff"] = value;
        }
    }
30 comments - Last comment @ 2020-09-28

Exceptional Standards Compliance

by in CodeSOD on

When we're laying out code standards and policies, we are, in many ways, relying on "policing by consent". We are trying to establish standards for behavior among our developers, but we can only do this with their consent. This means our standards have to have clear value, have to be applied fairly and equally. The systems we build to enforce those standards are meant to reduce conflict and de-escalate disagreements, not create them.

But that doesn't mean there won't always be developers who resist following the agreed upon standards. Take, for example, Daniel's co-worker. Their CI process also runs a static analysis step against their C# code, which lets them enforce a variety of coding standards.

22 comments - Last comment @ 2020-09-28

Just a Trial Run

by in Error'd on

"How does Netflix save money when making their original series? It's simple. They just use trial versions of VFX software," Nick L. wrote.

17 comments - Last comment @ 2020-09-21

Configuration Errors

by in Feature Articles on

Automation and tooling, especially around continuous integration and continuous deployment is standard on applications, large and small.

Paramdeep Singh Jubbal works on a larger one, with a larger team, and all the management overhead such a team brings. It needs to interact with a REST API, and as you might expect, the URL for that API is different in production and test environments. This is all handled by the CI pipeline, so long as you remember to properly configure which URLs map to which environments.

29 comments - Last comment @ 2020-09-21

Get My Switch

by in CodeSOD on

You know how it is. The team is swamped, so you’ve pulled on some junior devs, given them the bare minimum of mentorship, and then turned them loose. Oh, sure, there are code reviews, but it’s like, you just glance at it, because you’re already so far behind on your own development tasks and you’re sure it’s fine.

And then months later, if you’re like Richard, the requirements have changed, and now you’ve got to revisit the junior’s TypeScript code to make some changes.

27 comments - Last comment @ 2020-09-22

//article title here

by in CodeSOD on

Menno was reading through some PHP code and was happy to see that it was thoroughly commented:

function degToRad ($value)
{
    return $value * (pi()/180); // convert excel timestamp to php date
}
33 comments - Last comment @ 2020-09-28

A Nice Save

by in CodeSOD on

Since HTTP is fundamentally stateless, developers have found a million ways to hack state into web applications. One of my "favorites" was the ASP.NET ViewState approach.

The ViewState is essentially a dictionary, where you can store any arbitrary state values you might want to track between requests. When the server outputs HTML to send to the browser, the contents of ViewState are serialized, hashed, and base-64 encoded and dumped into an <input type="hidden"> element. When the next request comes in, the server unpacks the hidden field and deserializes the dictionary. You can store most objects in it, if you'd like. The goal of this, and all the other WebForm state stuff was to make handling web forms more like handling forms in traditional Windows applications.

17 comments - Last comment @ 2020-09-22

This Could Break the Bank!

by in Error'd on

"Sure, free for the first six months is great, but what exactly does happen when I hit month seven?" Stuart L. wrote.

12 comments - Last comment @ 2020-09-13

Put a Dent in Your Logfiles

by in CodeSOD on

Valencia made a few contributions to a large C++ project run by Harvey. Specifically, there were some pass-by-value uses of a large data structure, and changing those to pass-by-reference fixed a number of performance problems, especially on certain compilers.

“It’s a simple typo,” Valencia thought. “Anyone could have done that.” But they kept digging…

35 comments - Last comment @ 2020-09-11

Web Server Installation

by in Feature Articles on

Connect the dots puzzle

Once upon a time, there lived a man named Eric. Eric was a programmer working for the online development team of a company called The Company. The Company produced Media; their headquarters were located on The Continent where Eric happily resided. Life was simple. Straightforward. Uncomplicated. Until one fateful day, The Company decided to outsource their infrastructure to The Service Provider on Another Continent for a series of complicated reasons that ultimately benefited The Budget.

34 comments - Last comment @ 2020-09-24

Sleep on It

by in CodeSOD on

If you're fetching data from a remote source, "retry until a timeout is hit" is a pretty standard pattern. And with that in mind, this C++ code from Auburus doesn't look like much of a WTF.

bool receiveData(uint8_t** data, std::chrono::milliseconds timeToWait) {
    start = now();
    while ((now() - start) < timeToWait) {
         if (/* successfully receive data */) {
             return true;
         }
         std::this_thread::sleep_for(100ms);
    }
    return false;
}
11 comments - Last comment @ 2020-09-17

Classic WTF: Covering All Cases… And Then Some

by in CodeSOD on
It's Labor Day in the US, where we celebrate the labor movement and people who, y'know, do actual work. So let's flip back to an old story, which does a lot of extra work. Original -- Remy

Ben Murphy found a developer who liked to cover all of his bases ... then cover the dug-out ... then the bench. If you think this method to convert input (from 33 to 0.33) is a bit superflous, you should see data validation.

26 comments - Last comment @ 2020-09-10

We Must Explore the Null!

by in Error'd on

"Beyond the realm of Null, past the Black Stump, lies the mythical FILE_NOT_FOUND," writes Chris A.

25 comments - Last comment @ 2020-09-15

Learning the Hard Way

by in CodeSOD on

If you want millions in VC funding, mumble the words “machine learning” and “disruption” and they’ll blunder out of the woods to just throw money at your startup.

At its core, ML is really about brute-forcing a statistical model. And today’s code from Norine could have possibly been avoided by applying a little more brute force to the programmer responsible.

19 comments - Last comment @ 2020-09-04

Bidirectional

by in Feature Articles on

Merge-short arrows

Trung worked for a Microsoft and .NET framework shop that used AutoMapper to simplify object mapping between tiers. Their application's mapping configuration was performed at startup, as in the following C# snippet:

17 comments - Last comment @ 2020-09-21

Unknown Purpose

by in CodeSOD on

Networks are complex beasts, and as they grow, they get more complicated. Diagnosing and understanding problems on networks rapidly gets hard. “Fortunately” for the world, IniTech ships one of those tools.

Leonore works on IniTech’s protocol analyzer. As you might imagine, a protocol analyzer gathers a lot of data. In the case of IniTech’s product, the lowest level of data acquisition is frequently sampled voltage measurements over time. And it’s a lot of samples- depending on the protocol in question, it might need samples on the order of nanoseconds.

23 comments - Last comment @ 2020-09-21
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